Amy Irvine, environmental activist, writer and former
professional rock climber, sets her memoir,
Trespass, in the stark geology of Utah’s
red-rock wilderness. Following her father’s suicide, Irvine
retreats from Salt Lake City to rural Utah, where she is confronted
almost daily by divisive public land-use demands and ubiquitous
Mormon missionaries, not to mention her tumultuous love life.
At times scholarly, at times familiar, Irvine changes
tones with ease. She draws parallels between Anasazi culture and
modern life. The titles of the book’s sections – Lithic, Archaic,
Basketmaker and Pueblo – reflect her knowledge of Utah’s
prehistory, a structural originality that proves to be the book’s
greatest creative strength.
Though distinguished by
Irvine’s forays into regional history, Trespass
is in many ways a prototypical memoir, following an abused
child-to-rebel-to-wife-to-mother trajectory. Irvine’s suffering
leads her to an (often self-flagellating) role as an activist. She
ruminates on her estranged father’s suicide and her fear of being
driven, largely by a sense of rootlessness, to the same end.
Adversarial by nature, Irvine is deeply opinionated on
every controversy: wilderness versus rangeland; Mormons versus
gentiles; her need for home versus her lover’s nomadic
impulsiveness. The daughter of a Catholic and a Mormon descended
from Brigham Young’s right-hand man, Irvine wrestles with the
Mormon Church; it looms throughout the book as a threatening
monolith. Passionate and sexual, she finds Mormonism sadly devoid
of physicality. She grapples with what she sees as its inherent
sexism, as her female neighbors get married and have children
without pursuing careers or participating in community decisions.
Irvine, determined to break down modern life into its
primal constituents, sees “the unwavering want for water, meat,
sex, rest, peace” as the engine that drives civilization. The
natural world is intensely moving and comforting for her. She hikes
to combat stress and loneliness, and believes that “learning the
lie of the land seems as vital as paying the mortgage.”
Reflecting on her father’s death and her subsequent retreat to a
rural life, Irvine writes, “Organic materials. These are what I
turned to in the face of death, when I most needed some kind of
mooring.” Ultimately, Trespass is the record of
her honest search for mooring. Irvine’s introspection is graced by
good storytelling, but the historic research and the ambitious
breadth of Trespass truly make it shine.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Forces of nature.
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